Marigolds from the Americas in European gardens and in a painting by Bartolomeo Passerotti

Fond of marigolds? Or perhaps you remember your grandmother planting these flowers between the rows of vegetables to save them from pests? Marigolds, or Tagetes, reached Europe immediately after Columbus's expedition to America, and in Russia they were in fact the very first overseas crop. Once in Spain, the plant almost at once became a garden hit and soon appeared in every flowerbed of the Old World.

It is no accident that Bartolomeo Passerotti, a sixteenth-century Bolognese Mannerist and one of the founders of Italian still life, chose marigolds for his painting Youth with Flowers, an allegory of smell: by the middle of the century this flower had firmly entered fashion, and it has not left it since.